Wanderlust (28 page)

On the eighth morning I kneeled in a stream in my one-piece bathing suit, which was now literally the suit that I bathed in—on the few occasions, that is, when I actually took a bath, with soap, as opposed to just opportunistically splashing myself. The stream came up to my waist and I scooped handfuls of the clear, chilly water over my head, rinsing out shampoo. I brushed my teeth and watched my soapy spit drift downstream, then dried myself with my blue and white batik sarong and began walking across the green grass back to our hut. I felt better than I had in days. I felt good. My legs were covered with sores, at least two of which looked infected, and I kept discovering new mosquito bites. But I was clean, we knew where we were on the map, my mind was clear, and my body had reached a turning point. Instead of getting more weak and sore and tired every day, it had stabilized.

As I arrived back to the house on stilts where we'd slept the night before, Patricia came to the door. “James is having a malaria relapse,” she said.

Malaria can kill swiftly, or it can lie low, incubating for months or years before returning to cause fever, delirium, and bone-jarring pain. This would be James's third bout since arriving in New Guinea five years before. He was gray-faced and incoherent, lying on his sleeping bag in the hut. We had to get him out of the jungle.

As we'd moved northward along the Kokoda Trail, the villages had become more touched by the outside world. We'd met an American missionary in one, and seen a few little churches and wide grassy slopes.

PNG has a terrible road network, but apparently you could hitchhike by airplane. This village where we had spent the night had an airstrip, and according to the headman, a bush pilot made deliveries from the outside world every few days. He suggested we ask for a ride.

Much as I thought I wanted some respite from the trail, I was surprised and let down to learn that the possibility of exit was so near at hand. I realized that I regretted having to leave. For one thing, I had the sense of a task undone. Though we'd spent more than a week in the forest, I felt like I was cheating on my plan to “do” the Kokoda Trail. But there was something else I would also really miss. All the focus on the physical world, on mending our sores and getting enough food and finding our way, had a satisfying simplicity. It took my life away from nuance and analysis and complicated relationships. Maybe this was why people went to sea. I felt more alive than ever.

So we put on our backpacks, said good-bye to our guides, and walked out to the airstrip. We let pale, clammy James lie down and erected a tarp over him, taking turns bringing him water. At
mid-afternoon a small plane landed. The Australian pilot was reluctant at first, but when he saw James, he agreed to take our money and take us to the town of Kokoda.

In Kokoda we stayed the night in an abandoned school dormitory. The next morning, we rode in what passed for a bus—it was a flatbed truck with two benches and a canvas cover—from Kokoda to Popondetta. At least two dozen men sat on the benches, with more hanging on to bars and standing. James and Patricia rode with the driver in the cab, and Justin and I wedged into the back; when a space opened up on one of the benches we sat down, me in his lap. And there was his hard-on again, pressing against me, invisible and silent and enjoyed. PNG was, for us, “the exciting thing in exciting company,” as Graham Greene once wrote, inviting his lover to come to an India roiled by postpartition slaughter. I watched a man who had gotten on with a bunch of bananas and was hanging out the back, standing on the bumper with one hand gripping the canvas cover. Without ever losing his balance, he proceeded to eat all of the bananas one by one, throwing the peels onto the receding roadway behind us.

Patricia's boyfriend, Rupert, was a wise-cracking, voluble, balding Aussie. He met us on the airfield in Lae bearing chocolate-covered ice cream bars—he'd brought a cooler—which we lapped at like children. We piled into his car, where he blasted the air conditioner and Kurt Cobain, and he drove us to Patricia's home.

She shared a house with a roommate a short walk from her parents' place, though she said she used the connecting trail only in broad daylight when there had been no recent unrest. The house had what she called a “rape gate,” an indoor floor-to-ceiling gate made
of iron bars that could be locked to close off the bedroom wing from the living room, dining room, and kitchen; there was a telephone on the bedroom side so that the residents could retreat there and call for help.

Because it had the only double bed, Patricia gave us her bedroom. She went to sleep the first night at Rupert's, but on our second night in Lae she slept down the hall in her housemate's room. Our first night, as we were getting ready for bed, I looked at Justin and said, “She gave us her room.” He looked at me and shrugged. It was cushy after the trail and the abandoned dormitory in Kokoda, with flowered sheets, extra pillows, even a boxspring mattress. As we drifted to sleep that night, Justin said, “You know when I was asking you to tell me a story?”

“Mm-hmm?”

“That was how I was telling you I loved you.” It was the first time he'd said it, and I wasn't sure he needed to. One of the beautiful things about us, I thought, was the way in which we could feel things and know things without lathering them up in words. “Of course I love you,” I said.

Justin and I spent a day with Patricia and Rupert on her family's motorboat, picnicking and snorkeling around rocky coves. The night before we were to leave, I washed my face at the bathroom sink and took out my contacts. I opened my glasses case, but it was empty. Everything was a blur, but I didn't want to go to the trouble of putting my contacts back in, so I went looking for Justin. He wasn't in our room, so I passed the rape gate and entered the living room. Patricia and Justin were sitting there in the dark, him in an easy chair and her opposite him, a few feet away, on the sofa.

“Hey, can you help me find my glasses?”

I heard Patricia sigh.

“Sure, one sec,” Justin said, jumping up.

I stood there and reached out one hand to hold myself up against the wall.

“Sorry, I can't see a thing,” I said. I felt rude. Patricia didn't say anything, and Justin moved toward me. Since we'd finished the hike Patricia had grown chillier toward me, as though, with survival no longer at stake, we had little to talk about. Her unspoken feelings for Justin, whatever they were, loomed so obviously to me that I found it remarkable that her boyfriend didn't seem to notice. I didn't think she was plotting a stealth seduction of Justin, but she wanted something—maybe just time alone with him.

“Good night,” I said, with deliberate cheer, but she didn't answer.

Back in our—Patricia's—room, Justin found my glasses on a dresser right away.

“She was gearing up for a deep talk,” he said. “She told me that she has a card I sent her on her desk at work. She rereads it all the time.”

I felt bad for her. Maybe whatever romantic interest she had in Justin had been buried by material needs on the trail. Now that we were back in civilization, such as it was, and now that Justin was about to leave, her most turbulent emotions were reemerging. There'd been no opportunity on the trail to speak to Justin alone; then yesterday we'd spent with Rupert. This was her last chance. But for what? To express love?

The next morning, I was in the shower when Patricia left for work. When I came out Justin told me that she had told him, angrily, to just leave town already; she didn't want to speak to him again.

While Justin showered, the phone rang. I picked it up, and the person on the other end hung up with a click.

When it rang again, Justin answered; it was Patricia. Now she
wanted us to stop by her office. A driver for her company would pick us up, take us to her office, and then take us to the station.

I sat in the car in the parking lot while Justin went in. After a few minutes the driver went somewhere too, and I was alone. I stared at the yellowing fiberglass of a boat sitting on a parked trailer, and at the hot pink bougainvillea dripping over it. Justin was gone about twenty minutes. For the first time, my feelings for Patricia shifted from curiosity and empathy toward irritation. He was mine.

Justin came back.

“She's furious with me,” he said.

“She always seems so calm,” I said, hearing myself sound sullen. “And she has a boyfriend.”

“I told her that,” he said. “She told me she loved me.”

With the road shortage, there was no easy land-based way to go straight west to Madang, so we were going up and inland to Goroka, provincial capital of the Eastern Highlands, then back down to the coast. Tribespeople from the surrounding mountains came down to Goroka to trade fruit and coffee and pigs, and I read in a guidebook that it was the “rape capital” of the country.

Just after dark we left our hotel room and walked down the main street to find something to eat, ending up at another hotel that had a restaurant.

We talked about the trek, and Patricia and Rupert, which led Justin to pontificate on our respective characters.

“You're as strong as a lion and as vulnerable as a lamb,” he said.

This made me cringe and infuriated me. I didn't know where he got his vaguely biblical-sounding clichés—he'd also once told
me that I had the legs of a gazelle—and the comment grated in ways I couldn't fully explain. But the animal vocabulary was the least of his offenses.

“I'm not vulnerable,” I said.

“Of course you are,” he said.

“No, I'm not. How dare you.”

“I said you were as strong as a lion too! It's not bad to be vulnerable.”

“Does it make you feel like a big hero to think that I'm vulnerable?”

“Beth, we're all vulnerable.”

I knew I was picking a fight, but I felt wounded. I'd come through the jungle, for Christ's sake. I'd lived in Cairo and Karachi and a boat shed. Now he was poking holes in my hard-won confidence in my own strength. I would show him.